Tom: Everybody, welcome to Impact Theory.
You’re here because you believe that human potential is nearly limitless but you know
that having potential is not actually the same as actually doing something with it.
Our goal with the show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help
you actually make good on your potential.
All right.
I’m really excited about today’s guest because he thinks about shit deeply.
He crawls inside important ideas like an intellectual archeologist and roots around grubby fists
and all until he finds the narrative thread that makes those ideas accessible in an era
where people would tell you the only thing that matters is entertaining people.
He’s built a widely successful YouTube channel with roughly one million subscribers that
proves there’s still a huge market for depth.
His powerful essays on an absurdly wide range of topics from Batman and Rihanna to politics
and moral issues provide viewers with kinds of insights that can truly shape one’s worldview.
Recognizing his unique gifts, MSNBC snatched him up to produce for them when he was still
in his early twenties and the Discovery Channel tapped him to write and host a show on the
digital network Seeker Daily where he produced a hoard of breakout content.
He is, in my opinion, everything that is good about the internet and he’s proving that
creators from anywhere armed with a simple camera and a willingness to work their asses
off cannot only make a living as content producers but they can alter the very direction and
flow of cultural discourse.
Please help me in welcoming the man whose entirely self-made treasure throve of content
has been viewed more than 48 million times by people all over the world, the creator
of the smash hit YouTube series, the Nerdwriter, Evan Puschak.
Evan: What an introduction.
Tom: Dude.
Evan: I want that on my tombstone.
[crosstalk 00:02:04] I would love it.
Tom: Cool, man.
Well honestly, that, the intro was sort of the hurdle for bringing people on the show.
It’s like, "Am I willing to do enough research about the person to be able to write that?"
Evan: Yeah.
Tom: Am I going to get something out of it?
The researching, it was really awesome so Jason Silva put you on my radar …
Evan: Jason’s a great guy.
Tom: … and I’m eternally indebted to him for that and not being super familiar with
the essay format on YouTube is really, really interesting to see the diverse range of topics
that you cover which, of course, then led me to try to find out like what is the mission
statement that you guys have.
Evan: Yeah.
Tom: The concept of cultivating worldview, what exactly does that mean?
Evan: Well, it was something that launched the whole idea of the show and that was that
when I had graduated College of Boston, I had this very strange frustrating feeling
that I knew lot of things but I just didn’t know how they all connected.
I felt like I was constantly consuming contradictory information.
It just really just bothered me because I felt that I didn’t have a foothold on my
own knowledge.
Worldview for me was a kind of organizing principle of how do all the things that you
know connect.
How do you build a worldview in which you are building bridges between the different
spheres of things that you’re learning?
Cultivating is what you know and how those things connect and that’s what the show
is and that … I want to show people how I built my worldview not so that they can
adopt it but so that there can be a template for doing it yourself.
Tom: I love though that you've said and this is actually interesting, I want to go into
this, but you said that, "It’s okay if you want to adopt my worldview."
I think that’s how it starts.
You steal somebody else’s.
Evan: Yeah.
That’s how I did it.
Tom: Walk me through that because I think seeing the way that you do it is maybe it’s
certainly as important, maybe more important than the actual worldview that you present
which is very coherent and very compelling.
How does that process look if it starts with stealing somebody else’s while you get the
momentum going like how do you progress beyond that?
Evan: Well, you have to learn how to think.
I mean that’s the first part of it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson who’s one of the early thinkers that really blew my mind, said that
a young men reveres men of genius because to speak truly, they are more himself than
he is.
That is the perfect way to think about being young and trying to build a mindset for yourself
is that when you read the great philosophers or just the great thinkers about anything,
what is so enlightening about them is that they knew how to say these things.
They articulated them in a certain way that when I read ... I mean a lot of Emerson, almost
all Emerson, when I’m reading it was like this series of revelations where it was like,
"Yes.
That is what I was thinking about this.
This is what I want to say about it."
Emerson is right.
He was more me than I was at that moment because he was articulating those things.
You start off by adopting the beautiful thinkers and beautiful articulators of the past.
Then by just applying a bit of critical thinking, you’re going to carve out your own statue.
You’re going to carve the way the things that don’t mesh with you and you’re going
to add on the things that do.
I mean that’s a long process of cultivating something that you can have and use to judge
all incoming information against.
Tom: It’s interesting because without that eloquence was how I put things together in
my own head people often talk about thinking unique thoughts, right, and that’s a big
obsession.
It’s not a unique thought, whatever, and I thought, "Wow.
I’m not sure that I ever really have unique thoughts."
What I’m trying to do is take in enough information that I can make unique connections,
right?
What you’re saying paring away the sculpture until only you remain.
It's actually pretty beautiful.
Was it Michelangelo that said that?
Evan: Yeah.
Tom: I carve away the pieces that aren’t David or whatever until its form is finally
revealed.
Actually, it’s really interesting way of thinking about it.
Why do you think cultivating a worldview is useful?
Evan: I think it’s useful because it provides the foundation through what you can act.
It’s hard to act in the world in an intentional way without having a base or a foundation
in which you feel stable and you’re comfortable with.
That was the anxiety, the cosmic anxiety, I was feeling at that time when I was a little
bit younger was that I don’t know how to move forward here because I don’t feel like
I’m stepping on something that's, "Oh, I feel like I’m stepping on so many clouds."
It was disorienting.
When you start figuring out what your worldview is which is just another way to say, "When
you start to figure out what your morals are and what your philosophy is as an individual
person but also how that relates to the world, the way forward looks a lot more clear because
it almost becomes inevitable what you have to do."
When you make a moral decision, you’re making a decision based on how you should act.
Once you get a hand on it, I think the world becomes a little bit less scary and your actions
in it become a little bit more certain and intentional.
I think that’s what we’re all trying to do.
At least, that’s what I was trying to do back then.
Tom: Really great answer.
I love that metaphor that you’re using of it feeling like you’re stepping on clouds
that squishy marshy like, "Am I about to fall through," like ...
Evan: Yeah.
Exactly.
Tom: ... [crosstalk 00:08:08] very much I had in my early twenties for sure.
Do you know Pete Carroll?
Evan: Yeah.
Tom: I’m not a big sports guy but he happened to be the coach of USC and then the Seahawks
and being … Evan: Of course.
Tom: … from Tacoma and having gone to USC made my radar.
Then do you read Angela Duckworth’s book Grit?
Evan: I haven't.
Tom: He comes up in that and she really lays out his philosophy.
He was the coach of New England, the New England Patriots, and didn’t do well, ends up being
fired, goes to college football, ends up crushing it at USC and then going on to the Seahawks
and winning Super Bowl.
People ask him like, "What the hell, like how did you go from getting fired to having
such a crazy career in college and then back to the NFL’s winning coach?"
He said, "Somebody told me you lack a life philosophy."
He said it was really realizing that I needed a life philosophy, I needed that base that
you’re talking about to have the firmness under my feet, the way forward as you said
like the way forward becomes really clear.
I think when people are really thinking about like … so the question that I asked, "More
than anything, how do I find my passion," which actually maybe a side step to what you’re
really doing with your show.
Evan: That’s a crazy silly question, I think.
I mean that’s the question I hear a lot too.
I think that’s something that we’re inculcated to think about when we’re young and in college
or in the schooling system, how do you find your passion.
It’s something that you’re going to find under a rock which is not the way.
I think the great tragedy of modern society is that there is no thing for every individual
person.
You have aptitudes like if you can draw, then you have aptitude for that.
There are certain things biologically that you’re going to be given and you’ll be
lucky to have them.
In terms of finding your passion, everything in modern society because it does not push
you in certain direction, that’s what being in a free society means is a choice.
Because it’s a choice, it’s a tragedy.
It’s so arbitrary.
Tom: Why do you say it’s a tragedy?
I don’t understand.
Evan: It’s a tragedy because in a society where you're pushed to do a certain thing,
if you’re … 300 years ago, if your father was a cobbler, you’re going to be a cobbler.
You didn’t have many prospects outside of that but you didn’t have a chance to fail
at choosing something in your life.
You’re going to be a cobbler.
Your identity was stable from the start.
For us in this society where we are not only not told what to be but we’re not told how
to learn what to be which is to say we’re not told how to learn what your passion is,
it only comes down to a choice and the choice is arbitrary.
I think people and myself, there’s a difficulty in overcoming that fact because we want to
believe that the message we're given is that there’s a passion out there for you that
you have to discover and wait for it to … Tom: Right.
Like a soul mate.
Evan: … reveal itself like a soul mate.
Yeah.
The real truth is that you just have to choose.
Choosing is when it’s not based on anything is scary.
Tom: Let me follow that logic then.
Get worldview, realize then, based on worldview, that you’re going to pick a path leans to
passion?
Evan: Yeah, I mean passion will come, I think.
When you do something that you develop an expertise in …
Tom: Do you read Cal Newport’s book, " So Good They Can't Ignore You?"]
Evan: I haven’t, no.
Tom: I think judging by the way you’re saying now, you’re going to love it.
He goes to that thing where gaining mastery is a fundamental part of passion and if you
don’t get mastery, good luck.
Evan: Well, that’s the whole … Jason Silva who we both know and who is so intense and
so awesome, he loves talking about flow.
I love it as an idea.
When you pick a lane for yourself, you develop a mastery, you feel great about it.
If you have to you, you course correct.
I don’t think that it reveals itself to you, like something that was waiting for you
to find it.
That’s where people go wrong.
Tom: You’ve talked really powerfully about your own course corrections so really cool,
by the way.
For those of you who don’t know, he literally … he creates a video for this thing called
the K.I.N.D.
Project making desks for these underprivileged kids in Africa.
The video is just a smash hit, starts getting a lot of attention, gets on the news, goes
to MSNBC literally live in the broadcast.
The woman says, "Hey, somebody here should basically hire you."
[inaudible 00:12:46] which is incredible.
Then you realize, not loving this.
Evan: No, I didn’t.
MSNBC was great to me so I have to say that first and individual people there are extraordinarily
smart and very cool and all my bosses were great.
That experience was crazy because I was … work as a telemarketer selling car warranties just
absolutely hating my life and I made this one video and Lawrence O’Donnell, the host
of The Last Word, which is the 10 o’clock show, saw it, had me on the air.
Then the next day, he was in Burbank and asked me out for lunch and at that lunch, asked
me if I wanted to move to New York to work for them.
Tom: Wow.
Evan: He said, “Would you like to do … ?” I don’t know if he had the authority to do
it.
I don’t think he did.
They spent like five months trying to build the job for me there which I eventually took.
When I got there, I thought, "Maybe I’ll work my way through the ranks here and find
that this is what I love."
Then within I'd say a few months, it started to rub me the wrong way.
Tom: Well, so before we just gloss on, walk me through the mindset.
You’re there.
You're not loving it.
A voice in your head is very much saying this isn’t for me.
Evan: Yeah.
Tom: Most people say that for years, years and years and wouldn’t leave until some
kicks them out.
Evan: Well, I did.
Here’s the thing is that once I checked out of being a good employee at the company
which is horrible to say, but that’s the truth, is I would spend hours in an office
hidden way working on the Nerdwriter doing work.
Now, I don’t suggest that to people because you want to be a good employee but I had a
lot of free time there and so I was thinking I have to double down on my homework.
I just started working on that show all the time and then I quit when I thought that MSNBC
might be my path.
I left the Nerdwriter for a few months.
Then when it was not so great, I started up again and I was like, "Okay, I renewed my
passion for this."
I worked and worked and worked and then someone at Discovery saw the video.
They just said, “We’re launching a new show called Seeker Daily and would you be
interested in writing the show with a cohost and hosting it and launching it for us?”
I heard that and I felt the same way.
I felt like this could be my path.
We talked about sort of how does the show scale, I thought, "Well, maybe this is the
way.
Maybe I leave the Nerdwriter and work for Discovery where I’m like the higher leadership
position.
My editorial influence is greater.
Maybe, I’m the voice behind the show and I make it exactly like what I want with the
resources of Discovery.
Another learning experience that wasn’t …
Tom: Not quite how it went.
Evan: As soon as I checked out of there and started phoning it in, I started paying a
lot more attention to the Nerdwriter and what I really wanted to do.
Tom: It’s such a fascinating thing and so we’re sort of on opposite sides of the room,
right?
Evan: Sure.
Tom: I’m an employer so I know what it’s like to have a large group of people and have
this huge enterprise that can only work if you can find people that can feel their most
alive, right?
If there’s one thing I promise you is that it works for some people and other people
fucking hate it, right.
You’re constantly like, “Jesus, what do I do?”
because you want people to be alive and you wanted to be the thing that they want to do.
Like when I was told people as be here for the most selfish reason ever, like, don’t
come to work for me, right?
I'll think about me, I’ll obsessed about me, what I’m trying to do I’ll make sure
the company is fine.
You come for you because when somebody is in the room grinding it out because their
passion happens to align to what the show needs to be successful, unbelievably amazing
things happen.
Evan: Yeah.
Tom: We’re talking before we came on camera about boil things down to the physics, right?
Evan: Yeah.
Tom: The physics of being human is when you feel connected to something, when you feel
passionate, it makes you feel alive.
You want to do it, right?
You’re moving towards something.
No one has to tell you to do it.
There’s like this pull through demand of “This is my calling” or whatever.
Evan: Absolutely.
Tom: It’s fucking tricky.
It’s tricky on both sides of the fence.
Evan: It’s tricky because people like you say some aren't built for that and for me,
I studied film and narrative filmmaking and I thought I was going to be a future film
director.
One of the huge things about filmmaking that makes it so great that I hated was that it
was collaborative.
Tom: Right.
Evan: Okay?
Tom: Know thyself.
Evan: Know thyself, all right?
When I used to direct short films, I used to give the speech to my whole crew and I
was always the director I say, “Listen, I’m going to be a benevolent dictator here,
right?
I’d love what you say but I want to make it very clear that I have the final say on
everything and this is my vision that we’re all helping to realize my vision.
If that’s not for you, fine like we can get on to another film.”
I’m such a protective perfectionist about my own work that I work best when I am by
myself doing a project.
That’s why I quit filmmaking and started writing fiction because you do that by yourself.
Tom: Right.
Evan: Now, the Nerdwriter is a similar thing which is there’s nobody on the team.
It’s just me.
Collaborative in my life with my, not in my work.
In my life, I let people in.
There’s a give and take.
I love people.
They love me back.
It’s a very, very integrated thing.
There’s people out there who you’re never going to convince to be a part of that larger
thing, I think, and that must be the most difficult thing as a manager or a leader of
a company because people need jobs too.
Tom: Right.
Evan: What are they going to do?
Tom: Yeah, I mean that’s really fascinating.
It’s like parents, when they think about, "Okay, the techniques I used on Child A worked
but the techniques I used on Child A don’t work on Child B, so now what?"
That was actually interesting like my sister and I grew up in the same household different
outcome.
We have the same parents but some things work out really well for me and some things work
really well for her but there wasn’t like a lot of crossovers.
That’s what it’s like running a company is your natural techniques and I think that
the goal of a leader has to be to transcend your natural techniques to find something
like Pete Carroll says a life philosophy that allows you to figure the stuff out and to
tie back to what we’re talking about with cultivating a worldview.
You need to filter, right?
You need to know what to say yes to and what to say no to.
Whether that as a leader, whether that as an employee, whether that as an artist or
just somebody trying to make it through life figuring out what decisions to make, right,
from a moral standpoint … Evan: Of course.
Tom: You need to have that filter.
It is really difficult to when you start talking about a mass of people and this is what another
thing we’re talking about off cameras, so I’m looking at the Nerdwriter and I’m
thinking, “Fuck, like this content is on another planet like it's so good!”
I can just sit there and watch.
The real question that you should be asking is why do I think it’s good because it’s
going to be very different for other people.
For me, usability is all that matters.
I’m watching the content and I’m saying, “Shit, like I can really use this piece
of information,” like you totally fucked up my life.
You changed it in the most beautiful and amazing way with the Hemingway quote and the notion
of, was it [Kentagi 00:20:38]?
Evan: Kintsugi.
Tom: Kintsugi, thank you.
Evan: Yeah.
Tom: I’m watching that episode about Kintsugi.
The record player of my life skips grinds to a halt and I’m like, “This is unbelievable.”
The Hemingway quote that you threw in which I had never heard immediately put it on my
list of like life-changing quotes is life breaks everyone and some were stronger in
the places that broke.
Evan: Yeah.
Tom: I was … Evan: Great quote.
Tom: ... “Whoa.”
Evan: Great writer.
Tom: Walk us through that concept that art form, what it is, how it’s impacted you.
Evan: It’s so interesting because that’s a video that I’ve probably got the most
personal feedback about.
The concept is simple.
In Japanese culture, they have a craft art called Kintsugi where when ceramics are broken,
they don’t throw them out and buy another or create another one from scratch.
They put the ceramic piece back together.
The way that heats them is with gold, a kind of gold, adhesive gold sparkly ...
Tom: Seems like a mortar.
Evan: … material.
Yeah, it’s beautiful.
You get these pieces that are broken but at the cracks are more beautiful.
I thought that is such a perfect metaphor.
It’s not my metaphor because it goes into the Buddhist concept of wabi-sabi.
The idea that we are going to go through trauma and it’s particularly relevant for right
now in the post-election period, we are going through trauma.
Trauma is an opportunity to change and to reorganize the elements that made up your
life.
I gave a speech in Singapore a couple of weeks ago and when I spoke about was that when a
person’s mind is traumatized, it’s like the story they were telling themselves has
ceased to be persuasive.
When the story stops being persuasive, it is disorienting and that I think is what trauma
is, the period between when your old story breaks apart because of this last straw on
the camel’s back thing and we’re going to continue to tell ourselves the old stories
until it’s so glaringly contradictory that it doesn’t hold up.
Trauma is the period between when that breaks down and when you … from the pieces of the
old, build something new and we’ll never glorify the trauma itself but recognize that
in that period, you have a very unique opportunity that will only come along a handful of times
in your life to reorganize the story that you tell about yourself to yourself.
That for me is what Kintsugi is all about.
I think a lot of people just really connected with that idea.
Tom: For sure.
The idea behind my entire life and certainly the idea behind the show is that humans are
constructed, right, which is why I think Jason knew I would resonate with you the concept
of cultivating which is that you say cultivating worldview, right?
There’s something so active in cultivation.
It’s choices and you’re talking about the narrative and I’ve never heard anybody
say before the trauma is the moment where your old story breaks down, you can’t cling
to it anymore and you have yet to build the new one through Kintsugi.
That’s fucking beautiful, by the way, and thank you for that.
Evan: Thank you.
Tom: I’m a big believer that you have to open yourself up to being changed.
That really changed me.
That’s really fucking cool.
Thinking about this notion, I’m going to take an active role in rebuilding myself and
doing it in a way that becomes an art form like that’s super, super interesting to
me, so I’m going to wrap up really fast why I brought it up but I want to come back
to it.
Evan: Sure.
Tom: I brought it up just to talk about scalability.
Evan: Yeah.
Tom: You’re having this big impact on people which I think is important and I think we’re
living through a revolution right now.
The revolution is that the medium is changing so much that there are no gatekeepers anymore.
The only gatekeeper is your ability to get my attention.
That’s like when people really understand what that means ...
Evan: Huge, huge opportunity that should not be glossed over, yeah.
Tom: Yeah, it’s a paradox.
Evan: For creators.
Tom: You’ve risen up and there are other people like you.
Evan: Like I was born in this era ... Tom: Yeah, for sure.
Evan: ... for those reasons.
Tom: For sure.
Then, the next question becomes so how do you scale it?
I asked that from the position of somebody who wants you to touch more lives.
Evan: You know scaling for me is the thing that I’m constantly thinking about in the
business.
I mean 90% of my mental energy is going towards creating the videos which is all I really
want to do.
Now that the business side has become…
Tom: Is that really all you want to do?
You just want to create the videos.
Evan: Yeah.
I mean I’m a film director at heart, like, I’m a creator at heart.
The impact that comes out of it is so very important to me.
I try to engage with it as much as I can.
The business side of it particularly, it makes me cringe a little bit.
That said, I do think about scaling the show and what’s the way forward because I want
to make the most impact for work.
When I think of scaling, I think of it that way.
Tom: Yeah.
It’s interesting because I think that…
I look at the world in, let's say, if we were Venn diagrams like there’s 90% overlap.
I was watching your content and I’m like, “Yeah, I find this is interesting too like
it’s amazing like this guy’s DJ-ing my brain.”
It was like so much fun.
There’s like this area that doesn’t overlap where we see things differently.
When I look at anything, right, the first question I’m asking is scalability.
Now, that speaks to my personality.
It speaks to my worldview, not that objectively it’s right.
When I think about Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, right, you had one guy, all he cared about
was scale.
You have the other guy who’s so enjoyed the art of being on the motherboard and wiring
things together that he actually asked to be a mid level engineer.
Evan: Yeah.
Tom: You own the company and you…
Evan: He’s a fascinating guy.
Tom: …even request.
Evan: Even now like the things he sort of toils away with ... toils away are small but
you know it’s amazing.
Tom: We’re living through a time right now, the entrepreneurial generation…
Evan: Yeah.
Tom: Now, to really be an entrepreneurial, to be the lead, to be the alpha in an entrepreneurial
organization, it takes a certain personality type and not everybody that is going to enjoy
it.
I think a lot about my wife and I…
My wife and I co-founded the company.
She puts this whole show together.
Literally, I am the talent.
I am not just saying that, like, I’m the talent of her show, but the show what you
see like that’s her and the team.
I think about her personality type.
She has no interest in leading, right.
Evan: Yeah.
Tom: She wants to follow my vision…
Evan: …by the way.
Tom: Interesting.
Evan: Yeah.
Tom: I mean it speaks to your interest in Wozniak and just the desire to really create.
The funny thing is I went to film school.
I used to want to be on set.
I wanted to direct.
Then one day, I think it was my wife had asked me like, “Would you ever go back to directing?”
I said “No, I could never do that.”
Evan: Yeah.
Tom: The reason that I couldn’t go back to directing is for me, for my personality
type.
Once you taste scale, there’s no going back.
As you’re like talking about Nerdwriter and wanting it to be less content and more
impact, I’m like, “Fuck you, less content and more impact, that’s awesome.
So I'm going to put Evan on that” and then I’m going to have somebody over here doing
the daily content because we [inaudible 00:28:31].
It’s changing, bro.
Evan: Yeah.
Tom: You got to stay on that.
Evan: YouTube is changing.
Tom: Right.
Evan: I hear that and I might need to partner with a you-type figure in the future to do
this.
Seinfeld always says like the relationship with the show was so white hot that he knew
he had to stop after nine seasons because we’re going to offer him like $100 million
for Season 10 and he just knew that a little bit of too much can ruin the whole experience.
I want to make sure that I’m doing things right but I’m also not turning away from
the opportunities that are coming at me.
Tom: Sure.
There are a lot of self-awareness.
If you had to teach somebody how to be self-aware like that, what are the steps?
Evan: Oh, god.
That’s a good question.
You have to be brutally honest with yourself, I guess.
I mean put yourself around the people who will support the journey that you’re on.
For me, introspection is a one great source of the content that I make.
Tom: Do you have a strategy for introspection?
Do you put headphones on and listen to the sound of the rain?
Are there things that you do to facilitate that or…?
Evan: No, I hate the rain.
No.
Love the rain.
I don’t.
For me, there’s always a conversation happening …
Tom: In your head?
Evan: ... in my mind so it’s like my personal belief is that the mind is made up of language.
I am constantly…
you are constantly telling a story to yourself about yourself and about the world.
It’s got these two facets.
If you just take the time, you can listen to it and make it explicit.
Best way to do is to write it down because you don’t think without writing.
There’s no thought without languages.
You have to make it explicit.
When I was just graduated school, one of the first things I did is I read all the philosophy
that there was.
I started from the pre-Socratics and I went all the way down to the 20th century and try
to just get all the big benchmarks and read all the books.
Tom: With a particular bend for Albert Camus, if I remember correctly.
Evan: Yeah.
He was definitely a watershed moment.
After that, I wrote this thing called Discourse on Truth.
I had it bound up at Kinko’s and it looked really nice.
It had the perfect font and I got a A4 paper and I made like 100 copies of it.
This was like very highfalutin kind of very pretentious leeward thing that went through
truth and ways to know it and things like that.
I gave it till all my family and my friends who are like, "What is this thing?
You know, this looks like you just, you know …"
It was so important for me.
When you learn how to listen to your own story and write it down, I think self-awareness
is like an inevitable byproduct of that because you get addicted to knowing what you think
about something.
I think there's this weird state we all have operating on old memories and we're operating
on things that we read but we haven't really retained.
As soon as you start transferring that whole messy cloudy misty area of knowledge into
explicit knowledge, you're going to start seeing a lot more in yourself and what's out
there.
My advice is to write, just write and the rest will follow.
Tom: The story that you were telling about the journal that you wrote is, what was it,
the Truth what?
Evan: Discourse on Truth.
Tom: The Discourse on Truth.
Evan: At all [inaudible 00:32:22] bookstores.
Tom: It's actually pretty interesting in that it made me think about how people because
I know what your family was thinking when they read it like, "Oh God," right, like it's
pretentious [crosstalk 00:32:35] … Evan: He graduated from school.
He doesn't have a job but he's going to do this.
Tom: Right.
Here's the thing like when people see little kids learn how to walk and like they stopped
peeing in the bed, "Oh my God," right, they're ecstatic.
They're over the moon.
We should be thinking the same thing about intellectual development, right, because maybe
that was like a little cringe-worthy or whatever.
Evan: Certainly.
Tom: What it's actually really important exploration.
I went through a similarly cringe-worthy thing in my late teens in high school when I got
really into Eastern Philosophy.
I had the [crosstalk 00:33:11] ... for everything, right?
Be like water, my friend.
You know I mean that kind of shit.
I remember like I was convinced I was going to go to college, get my degree is like the
safety net but then I was moving to the wilderness in China.
Evan: Dude, I am so with you.
I have the same thing.
Tom: My man.
Evan: I was like ... I got to this point where I was like, "Oh I have to work my body out
like I have to be a farmer."
I went to work on a farm for like a few months because I was like [crosstalk 00:33:39] this
is the inevitable last step of this journey that I have to go and so I have to do it.
Then, I thought, "I'll probably have to just be a monk for 10 years," and I was like considering
the ways of telling my family that I wasn't going to be able to contact them because in
monk school, you can't contact them.
Tom: Monk school.
I like that.
That is badass.
Tell me about the farm.
Evan: I went to Normandy in France through a program called [Help X 00:34:00] which is
like you live in someone's farm and they feed you and work for them.
Eventually, I got over that.
Thank God.
[crosstalk 00:34:08] Tom: I'm going to guess you actually learned
some lessons from that kind of hard-ass work?
Evan: Yeah, you do.
You learned to persevere through pain because working a whole day moving branches or moving
heavy pieces of wood it's so exhausting.
People who do that for their whole lives, I only did it for a very short period of time
but it was very illuminating in that way is that you just have to keep working at it and
eventually, you'll finish.
That was a direct outgrowth of the philosophy thing that we were talking about.
It was like, "This is the path I have to take."
Tom: Yeah.
That's really fascinating.
That's how I think of the gym by the way.
For me, it's like [crosstalk 00:34:58] ... Evan: I haven't mastered that yet.
Tom: When I was a kid, I always have a job during the summers and because I was so insanely
lazy, I would take whatever job my parents will get from me because I don't want to go
apply for a job so that meant it was always manual labor.
I worked in a paint factory.
I did a paint store.
I worked doing literal like hard labor.
There was one summer where all I was doing was odd jobs so I spent some time smashing
concrete with a pickaxe and like just doing all the stuff that is your mind literally
is if you have a certain personality type and I think that we share that like your mind
is just racing, "Get me out of here," or you go into a Zen state, right.
You find this way to separate your mind from your body so that your brain can like go explore,
go daydream, be somewhere else, be creative while your body is set to this task.
It's actually one of those periods where your mind has a lot of really productive thinking
because you so want to escape the reality of what you're doing at that moment that the
only place to go is in.
I actually found ... I loved you explanation about write it down that makes it concrete
and it takes this sort of a [inaudible 00:36:10] mush and turns it into something very real.
I felt that way about having manual labor to do because my body was taken care of.
There were no distractions.
Oddly enough, there were no distractions from my physicality.
I was totally engrossed in this thing, right.
This amount of cement has to be broken apart.
This vat of paint has to be cleaned out, like whatever it is, you set your body to that
task.
You read Kurt Vonnegut?
Evan: Of course.
Tom: All right.
I forget which story it's in but there's one where the people can move their body in the
direction and then send their mind in the opposite direction, they can actually exit
their body.
That felt so true to me because that was what manual labor was for me.
I would send my body over here to do something and then I would turn my mind to this way
to deal with some intellectual pursuit, some other film idea or who knows?
In doing that, really learning to go deep.
That's why I was asking you like what your process is that one of the first questions
I wrote down that I wanted to ask you was, what is your process?
You've done such a good job of taking a subject, like Rihanna's Work, work, work, work song.
Like you've got a whole fucking like show about that song.
Evan: I love that video.
I love the [crosstalk 00:37:19] … Tom: How is this happening?
He made a show.
He spent a week on this song and it's really interesting.
Evan: Hardcore week.
Tom: How did you train yourself to go deep like that?
Evan: I think when you write a lot, it makes it a little bit easier to compose a story.
That part of my brain is ... and mind is still is primed for taking information and composing
it into something that is persuasive and like a story.
Every week or whenever I come up with something for the Nerdwriter, It's usually a combination
of some kind of introspective thought process that I want to talk about and something from
the world that I've consumed that I think is interesting and like talk about and it
was like, "Oh, there's a, there's a good interaction between those two.
Let's see what I can do there."
Once I have that, which is the hardest part, because ideas are just a bitch.
Then, I researched very intensely for a week or two weeks …
Tom: Do you give intention to your subconscious at all?
Forget who it was that said it.
Maybe Einstein.
Oh god, it was one of the like big scientists who said, "Never go to sleep without making
a demand of your subconscious."
I thought, "Wow.
Well, this guy has accomplished a lot in his life so I'm going to take that pretty seriously."
Evan: Well, I mean there is a truth in that your mind works out problems when you sleep.
Yeah.
A lot of times, I will be totally stuck on something and go to sleep and wake up the
next morning finding that I've solved that persuasive problem whatever it is.
Tom: That's awesome.
Evan: Yeah.
Tom: All right.
What's the impact that you want to have with your life?
Evan: With my life?
I don’t know.
You said earlier in the interview that you saw something that was in one of my videos
and it sort of stopped you in your tracks and helped you think a different way.
I've been talking about a lot in this interview.
For me, we learn by saying not thinking.
We learn by articulation and articulation is what makes the world go round.
The impact I want to have is I want to articulate things in such a way that people actually
view a different world than they viewed before they heard what I said about it, because the
world and our minds are made up of language and when you find a new way to write that
language, you change the world and you change people's minds.
Tom: Man, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Absolutely incredible.
Evan: It's been awesome.
Tom: That's fantastic.
All right.
Where can these guys find you online?
Evan: You can go to the Nerdwriter on YouTube.
If you just type in the Nerdwriter in Google, you'll find it.
I have a Twitter as well but I mean it's all happening at the Nerdwriter Show so watch
it.
Subscribe.
Tom: All right.
Guys, be sure to do that.
You're going to want to go deep in this man's world.
I promise you, it doesn’t matter what you are interested in.
He has gone down that rabbit hole and he has come back with the nuggets of gold that you
need to understand, in his words, to open a new door for you and show you things in
a totally new way to help you put unique connections between things that you never would have imagined
before.
The idea of actively cultivating your world view, of building that platform and translating
it from clouds that really feel like you're going to fall, you're on unstable ground and
making it this platform that's actually going to let you find out what you want to do, how
to move forward, pivot.
If you're later in your life, it doesn’t matter.
Going in and learning how to think, learning how to objectively critique these things and
really go in and discover truth that you don’t see when you're skipping across the surface
and what I love is he will do the profane, the profound.
He will go on pop music and make you realize that there is a layer of depth and interconnectivity
that you never could have imagined, but then, he'll also break down Gotham City through
the ages and deal with comic books.
It is fucking incredible.
It is a whole universe unto this man and the most amazing thing that you're going to take
away is you're going to realize that there's a whole universe unto you and he is going
to help you tap into that.
Subscribe, drink deeply of this man's stuff.
It is unbelievably great.
Evan, thank you so much for coming on the show, man.
Evan: It's my pleasure.
Tom: Please, give it up.
Evan: Thank you.
Tom: Guys, you know this is a weekly show.
If you haven’t, already be sure to subscribe.
We are trying to get as many amazing people like this on the show as humanly possible
and if you rate and review that will help us out.
Go to iTunes, Stitcher, let us know what you think.
Tell the world about the show and until next time, my friends.
Be legendary.
Evan: Subscribe.
Tom: Thank you, man.
That was awesome.
Evan: [crosstalk 00:42:07] a lot fun.
Tom: Thank you.
Hey, everybody.
Thanks so much for joining us for another episode of Impact Theory.
If this content is adding value to your life, our one ask is that you go to iTunes and Stitcher
and rate and review.
Not only does that help us build this community which at the end of the day is all we care
about but it also helps us get even more amazing guests on here to share their knowledge with
all of us.
Thank you, guys, so much for being a part of this community and until next time, be
legendary my friends.
How did we do?
If you rate this transcript 3 or below, this agent will not work on your future orders